Language Log

Steve Pinker swung by Edinburgh yesterday to deliver a masterful Enlightenment Lecture to a crowd of roughly a thousand, and to sign copies of The Stuff of Thought for eager fans. As usual, both on the stage and off, Steve had a fund of funny anecdotes, surprising facts, and new ideas about language; and he pointed out to me that Language Log had not yet noted a new and quite astonishing political appeal to semantics in the news, by John McCain's campaign spinners.

At a Town Hall meeting on May 28, McCain expressed confidence in the "Surge" policy on Iraq troop levels (which started in February 2007): "I can tell you that it is succeeding. I can look you in the eye and tell you it's succeeding. We have drawn down to pre-surge levels." The actual facts are that the present troop levels in Iraq are around 155,000, while the January 2007 numbers were 128,569. That is a 26,000 increase from pre-Surge levels. McCain made a flatly untrue statement. So what did his staff do? McCain's foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann dismissed it as mere linguistic nitpicking on the part of the journalists: "It's the essence of semantics," he claimed. "If you're going to start fact-checking verb tenses, we're going to make sure we start monitoring verb tenses a lot more closely than we have in this campaign." He apparently meant that troop levels will come down to below 2006 levels in the future, and that is what his boss should be understood to have meant. This is unbelievable mendacity, even by the standard of presidential campaign politics.

The links below will allow you to listen to a brief clip from each of Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama. But there's a trick — it's not actually their voices. Instead, I've tracked the pitch and amplitude of a short passage from the speech that each of them gave on Tuesday night, and then "played" that melody on a simple synthetic instrument (just five harmonically-related sinusoids with 1/F amplitudes, not that it matters). It seems to me that you can tell who's who pretty easily — but my opinion doesn't matter, because I've heard the originals. So listen and see what you think:

I CAN'T TALK ENGLISH PROPER SAYS PREZZA

Thus trumpeted a headline in last Wednesday's issue of The Sun (the UK's trashiest tabloid; Scottish edition, page 6). Prezza is John Prescott, a burly politician in the UK Parliament (at one time deputy prime minister), much loved for his newsworthiness. He makes amusing gaffes in his public pronouncements, and he had an affair with his secretary, giving him a mockability index something like Bill Clinton and George Bush combined as far as the UK tabloids are concerned. The story begins: Former Deputy PM John Prescott finally admitted it yesterday — he has trouble speaking English. He simply had not mastered the grammar of the English language, for reasons going back to his non-academic public secondary school. Plenty of quotes follow to illustrate what The Sun calls "his often-garbled ramblings".

Well, let's just get an expert diagnosis before we buy the story, shall we? Language Log has examined the evidence. And — perhaps you can guess if you remember such previous posts of mine as Does Julia Gillard know subjects from objects? back in 2006 and Arnold Zwicky's It's all grammar in 2004 — the evidence shows not a single trace of what it is supposed to show.

The sad fact is that when accusations of not being able to speak the language are tossed around, it is common — such is the level of public ignorance about grammar — for neither the accusers nor the accused to know what they are talking about, or to be able to tell whether the accusations are true or not.

I stress again, this is not a defense of bad grammar, or a defense of John Prescott. It is a sociological remark, a metacomment about the degree to which my profession has failed to instill in the typical politician, journalist, or (presumably) newspaper reader any real idea of what the notion "grammatical" might mean.

Most of us haven't thought much about the word chad since the 2000 presidential recount in Florida. The word dominated the news so much back then that the American Dialect Society anointed it Word of the Year. But now the HBO docudrama Recount has brought back memories of chad — taking us back to the innocent days when the word was a novelty even to experienced political operatives.

Here's the key exchange between two Gore staffers, Ron Klain (played by Kevin Spacey) and Michael Whouley (played by Denis Leary):

Klain: How does a thing like that even happen?
Whouley: Because punch card ballots are primitive. You get cardboard chad that get punched, but don't go all the way through the holes so they're hanging off the edge of the ballot.
Klain: Hanging chads.
Whouley: Chad.
Klain: What?
Whouley: There's no S.
Klain: The plural of chad is chad?
Whouley: That's great democracy.
Klain: Jesus.

The conference I'm attending, LREC 2008, is being held in Marrakech, Morroco, "under the High Patronage of His Majesty King Mohammed VI".  I don't know what this means in practical terms: does this patronage come with a subsidy, or is it simply a conventional phrase for events held at the government-run Palais des Congres, or what? I'll ask Khalid Choukry or one of the other conference organizers; but in fact, I'm more interested in the linguistic aspects of this "high patronage" than the practical ones.

There's a "Quorum" (in the sense of a discussion among a select group) up at Freakonomics on the topic "What Will Globalization Do To Languages". I'm one of the participants. I tried, perhaps too hard, to find something non-obvious to say on this topic — maybe I just should have sounded the tocsin for preservation of endangered languages.

Everyone (well, almost everyone) knows that context is important when we try to understand meaning. Linguists deal with context in phonology, grammar, and discourse, as well as at the social and psychological levels and probably a few other levels that I can't think of at the moment. And when you look at language in the context of time (when something was said in the past), it's relatively easy to find fault with silly people like us who change our minds about some wacky position we once held. Years, months, weeks, or even minutes ago most of us said, sometimes even believed, something that we wouldn't want to support any longer. But there are bullies out there who ignore such time contexts so if you said it once, you're stuck with it forever.

This is obvious, and I'm a bit embarrassed to even mention it, but I feel I really have to, because it's so common in our gotcha-ridden times. So I've decided to come clean and wrench from temporal context one of my own serious character flaws…before someone else has the chance to zap me first. So, if you're still with me, here it is.

Back on April 15, Robert Beard posted an entry on "Dr. Goodword's Language Blog" about the word superdelegate, writing that "the US press is pushing a new word into our collective vocabulary in an apparent attempt to tilt the US elections in the direction it prefers" (i.e., in the direction of Barack Obama to the detriment of Hillary Clinton). He hammered the point home, calling superdelegate a "new pejorative term," a "new epithet," and so forth. A few days later I pointed out here that the word is in no way new: it can be documented from 1981 and was becoming firmly entrenched in non-pejorative political usage by the time of the 1984 Democratic National Convention. Dr. Beard/Goodword has now responded in the comments section and has revised his original post, so I'd like to follow up on his latest points.

The news is full of headlines about Senator Clinton's "apology" for her tone-deaf comment about the RFK assassination: "Clinton apologizes for citing RFK killing"; "Clinton apologizes for gaffe"; "Clinton apologizes for Kennedy comment"; "Clinton Sorry for Remark about RFK Assassination"; "Clinton sorry for Kennedy remark"; and hundreds of others.

But from a linguistic point of view, these headlines are wrong. Here's the evidence:

Early last week, Hillary Clinton had a bit of pronoun trouble, as Daffy Duck would say. The AP reported:

"All the kitchen table issues that everybody talks to me about are ones that the next president can actually do something about," Clinton said Sunday night, "if he actually cares about it."

The word hung in the air only for a moment.

"More likely, if she cares about it," she added.

Tonight after her overwhelming victory in the Kentucky primary, Clinton made sure she didn't repeat her mistake. She told supporters:

And that's why I'm going to keep making our case until we have a nominee, whoever she may be.

This post follows up on my promise ("Sax Q & A", 5/17/2008) to respond to Dr. Leonard Sax's answer to my 2006 critique of the sensory physiology and psychophysics in his 2005 book Why Gender Matters. The first installment, yesterday, was about hearing ("Liberman on Sax on Liberman on Sax on hearing", 5/19/2008). This one is about vision. I'll try to make it shorter, and I'll try to keep it entertaining — but I'll warn you again, this is probably more than you want to know about the subject, unless you're deeply interested in the anatomy and physiology of vision, or in the rhetoric of Dr. Sax's movement.

According to a recently published and very influential book, scientists have recently discovered some amazing things about the differences between boys and girls. For example, girls' hearing is said to be an order of magnitude more sensitive than boys' hearing. And this is a difference with major consequences in public as well as private life:

The difference in how girls and boys hear also has major implications for how you should talk to your children. I can't count the number of times a father has told me, "My daughter says I yell at her. I've never yelled at her. I just speak to her in a normal tone of voice and she says I'm yelling." If a forty-three-year-old man speaks in what he thinks is a "normal tone of voice" to a seventeen-year-old girl, that girl is going to experience his voice as being about ten times louder than what the man is hearing. […]

The gender difference in hearing also suggests different strategies for the classroom. … [E]leven-year-old girls are distracted by noise levels about ten times softer than noise levels that boys find distracting. … If you're teaching girls, don't raise your voice …. [but] the rules are different when you're teaching boys.

That passage is from p. 18 of Why Gender Matters: What Teachers and Parents Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Single Sex Education, by Dr. Leonard Sax, a pediatrician who is the leading light of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education (NASSPE). Dr. Sax is a tireless advocate for the view that boys and girls are so different, in so many scientifically proven ways, that it makes no sense to try to educate them in the same classroom.

There's just one problem: the scientific foundations of this "emerging science of single sex education" are exaggerated, misunderstood, or misrepresented. At least, that's true in the cases where I've checked the original research that Dr. Sax cites, including especially his assertions about sex differences in hearing.

I posted about this two years ago; and a couple of months ago, Dr. Sax posted on the NASSPE web site a letter answering my objections. A few days ago, a reporter asked me for my reaction to his letter ("Sax Q & A", 5/17/2008). So here goes — I warn you that this may be a little tedious, unless you're specifically interested in some of the more obscure techniques for studying human hearing, or in the rhetoric of Dr. Sax's movement.

As a result of some Language Log posts a couple of years ago, I get quite a few inquiries from journalists about Dr. Leonard Sax and his science-based arguments for single-sex education. It's in the nature of things that only a small fraction of such discussions wind up in the resulting articles. For example, for Elizabeth Weil's NYT Magazine piece ("Teaching Boys and Girls Separately", 3/2/2008), I wound up sending about 4,000 words worth of emails to the author and her fact-checker, in response to their questions about specific points raised in some of Dr. Sax's writings. In the final article, this all wound up as background to a 250-word passage about sex differences in hearing. (See "Scupulously avoiding sigma", 3/2/2008, for some comments about other aspects of the article.)

I'm not complaining; Ms. Weil had a lot of material to cover, and she didn't have a lot of space to work with. However, another recent journalist's inquiry, raising some of the same issues, inspired me start a new policy. From now on, when I get inquiries from journalists, I'll try to post an edited version of my responses on Language Log. This may be of interest to some readers — and of course our famous money-back guarantee is available to the rest of you — and it will also make it easier for me to deal with subsequent questions about the same issues.

In this case, I'll start with my responses to the four new questions that arrived yesterday afternoon. The answer to the last one brings up some of those emails sent to Elizabeth Weil, which I'll post in an edited form later this weekend.